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al Qaeda Founder Changes Sides

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The spy who came in from al-Qaeda

Aimen Dean

Aimen Dean is a founder member of al-Qaeda, who changed tack in 1998 and became a spy for Britain’s security and intelligence services, MI5 and MI6. Interviewed by Peter Marshall, he describes his years working in Afghanistan and London as one of the West’s most valuable assets in the fight against militant Islam.

Bosnia

Dean was brought up in Saudi Arabia, where opposition to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s made military jihad a noble concept. He was a teenager when Yugoslavia splintered, and Bosnian Muslims found themselves in mortal danger from Serb nationalists. He and a friend, Khalid al-Hajj – later to become the leader of al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia – set off to become mujahideen.

I would say it was the most eye-opening experience I ever had. I was a bookish nerd from Saudi Arabia just weeks ago and then suddenly I find myself prancing up on the mountains of Bosnia holding an AK-47 feeling a sense of immense empowerment – and the feeling that I was participating in writing history rather than just watching history on the side.

And also at the same time, being in the military training camps, receiving knowledge that I never thought in a thousand years I would be receiving about warfare and war tactics and military manoeuvres, and to be receiving it alongside people from many different nationalities, with the one common factor among them that they were all Muslims. And they were all there in order to participate in the jihad in defence of the Bosnian population, was in itself also an overwhelming experience.

Q: You weren’t afraid?

A: Between you and me, I think at the beginning I was afraid of the unknown rather than afraid of the fact that I’m going into, embarking on a journey that might end up with all of us being killed actually.

Q: You didn’t fear death?

A: I would be lying if I say no I didn’t fear death but I started to come to peace with the idea that yes, I am entering Bosnia. Most likely I will never come out of it.

Q: Did you want martyrdom, did you want to die?

A: Yes.

Jihad school

By the end of the Bosnian conflict I started to notice something else within my comrades. Those who survived started to adopt a rather more anti-Western, anti-globalisation feeling that the global community were conspiring against the Muslims in Bosnia because they were turning the tide of the war in their favour – so they wanted to end the war there and then before they score any more victories.

At least that’s the perception. And with that perception, I think they started to feel that the West is fighting Islam as a religion… and that led to further radicalisation that made it easy for them to make the transformation from being mujahideen into being jihad operatives.

Bosnia was a school in which many talented leaders of al-Qaeda were born. Khalid Sheikh Mohamed [accused of being the architect of the 9/11 attacks] was one of those people who were in Bosnia.

The impression I had at that time, was that he was there in Bosnia in order to spot talent, let’s put it this way, in order to you know scout for talents who will be useful for the later struggle.

I remember that one of the things he said, and it was in a wedding where we were seated next to each other basically, and one of the things he said, he said, “Well, the Bosnian war seems to be ending here, that you know the end is in sight but what will happen after the war? The question is are we going to roam the globe from one hopeless battle to another trying to save a Muslim population until someone else, and then someone else come and reap the reward?”

In other words, there will be a government that is secular and doesn’t rule by the rules of Sharia. He says that this cycle need to end and that we have to think about another front where we can serve Islam and basically resurrect the spirit of jihad within the Muslim world. I think that little speech was the first indication that things are moving from jihad being an instrument to defend Muslim populations on the frontiers to an instrument to bring down regimes and to fight a terror war… against the US interests in the region.

Q: To become terrorists rather than soldiers?

A: Absolutely.

Joining al-Qaeda

I was invited to Kandahar to give the allegiance basically and as with everyone who give allegiance Osama bin Laden will give you know a one-to-one meeting basically with those who are joining and then he welcomed me into the fold. He basically said that there will be many, many years of difficulties and hardship, and that the cause of jihad is not going to start with him or end with him.

Q: You swore an oath?

A: Yes.

Q: What was the oath?

A: “I give you an allegiance to fight alongside you in good times and in bad times and to fight the jihad against the enemies of god and to obey my commanders.”

Q: What were you doing when you were swearing the oath? Do you stand, do you kneel?

A: You sit next to him on the floor basically and you know you have your hand on a copy of the Koran and you say it. Almost knees touching each other basically.

Q: And this is a moving moment presumably?

A: Yes, although like you know I have to say looking back at it basically, I felt you know the same dread of the unknown that I felt before I went to Bosnia.

Q: You knew it was a big leap you were taking?

A: Yes.

Afghanistan

At home in Saudi Arabia Aimen Dean had been a Muslim theological prodigy. In Afghanistan it was his responsibility to train al-Qaeda recruits – many from Yemen – in the basics of Islamic theology and history and the essentials of religious practice. This opened his eyes to the jihadists’ different motivations.

There is no single process of radicalisation. Some people, it took them years to be convinced of coming to the jihad and some people it took them minutes. Some people were studying in religious seminaries – they’re a minority by the way – and then decided to come and some people basically just came straight out of a night club you know while he was consuming alcohol basically to come and seek redemption there in the jihadist world.

So you know you see immediately that you know there isn’t one single classical journey there, that there are so many journeys.

Q: But they all want martyrdom?

A: They all want martyrdom and redemption and to various degrees. Some people will come to you and say you know I’m really tired, I want to be martyred as soon as possible. And some people will come to you and say I want to be martyred but not before I give the enemies of god hell on this earth. I want to live for as long as possible to give them as much hell as possible and then taken out by them.

Q: So some, some are basically suicidal to begin with, and others just have blood lust?

A: Yes.

Doubts

Dean was at a training camp in Afghanistan when the bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam took place in 1998. He was concerned to learn that as well as the 12 American casualties, 240 or more local people died, and 5,000 were wounded.

I think that is when the horror of it started to sink in. And this is when I realised that if this is the opening salvo of this war, where is the next target? Argentina, South Africa, Mozambique? Are we going to fight Americans in Africa in order to expel them from the Middle East, from the Arabian peninsula? It just didn’t make sense.

And as a theologian, that’s when I started to have doubts about the legality of the whole thing. So I started to ask questions. I went, I remember, to Abdullah al Mohaja, who was the de facto mufti of al- Qaeda… I said, “It’s not that I have doubts or anything but can you please enlighten me about the religious justifications for attacking an embassy belonging to the enemy, yes, but at the same time the fact that it’s surrounded by potentially huge collateral damage?”

And he said to me, “Well look, there is a fatwa issued in the 13th Century AD throughout the Muslim world, which legitimises attacking an enemy even if it means there are civilian deaths because the enemy is using them as a human shield.” And he said, “This fatwa is comprehensive, it gives us justification and there is no doubt about the legality of what we have done.”

So I decided to go and look for myself, and this is when I received a big shock. The fatwas were issued in response to questions sent by Muslim cities in Central Asia, Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara, asking this particular question: “Look, the Mongols are invading. Every time they sack a city, they take a segment of the population from that city, a thousand or two or three, and make them push the siege towers towards the walls of the next city. So do we shoot at our fellow Muslims, who are against their wills pushing the siege towers into the walls of our city, or not?”

And then the fatwa came: “Yes, this is a case where the Mongols are using civilian Muslims as human shields in order to achieve a military aim and if you don’t shoot at them, you will end up being killed yourself if the attacks succeed.”

Now when I learned of this, I was thinking: “OK, how do I reconcile this fatwa which applies to a life-and-death situation, regarding a vicious enemy using people as human shields to sack another place and to kill every man, woman and child in that city, with what happened really in Nairobi and Tanzania?” There is no resemblance here.

Q: And this fatwa based on siege towers from 800 years ago, that’s what’s used to justify all acts of jihadi terrorism?

A: That would result in civilian casualties, yes.

Q: So it’s important?

A: It is important but you know I’m not going to say it has shaky foundations. It has no foundations at all. It’s basically castle of sand in the air.

Q: It’s nonsense?

A: Absolutely, and two months down the line I decided that it’s no longer for me and that I wanted to leave.

Becoming a spy

Still barely out of his teens, and deeply troubled, Dean says he went to the Gulf for medical treatment, having privately decided not to return. Instead, he found himself in the hands of MI6. In 11 days, he says, he was turned. After four years and two months as a jihadi, he landed in London on 16 December 1998, and the debriefing began.

I think seven months of debriefings, that was more or less helping them put together a better picture of these organisations and the groups and who are the influential people within them.

Q: Because you knew Osama Bin Laden, Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, Abu Zubeida. You knew everybody.

A: Yes… Seven months into the debriefings, that’s when the suggestion [came]: “What about you going back to Afghanistan and doing some more work for us?” And my answer was unequivocally, “Yes.” I didn’t have any qualm with that at all.

Q: What did you do?

A: Passing back information, that’s what my primary objective was, to collect as much information as possible – and that wasn’t an easy task because you have to rely entirely on your memory. You can’t write anything. Everything has to be stored in the mind, nowhere else… Whatever moral misgivings I had, I have my ex-comrades to thank for driving those moral misgivings away because the more I see what they were planning – for example, I was there basically when al-Qaeda was constructing their first workable chemical device and talking about this with such glee and such deep psychopathic satisfaction… – that is when you say to yourself, “Why do I have any moral misgivings about spying on you guys?” Whatever they are doing is justifying whatever you are doing.

Q: You had to play along with them obviously?

A: Of course. I was still preaching, I was still stating how committed I am to the cause.

Q: That must be tricky, though, because in some ways because you’re there preaching, you’re again giving theological justification for some of the bad things that you know that they’re up to.

A: Yes, but at the end of the day if you want to catch rats, you have to go into the sewage system basically and get dirty yourself.

Q: So you were in Afghanistan and you were coming back and forth to the UK as well.

A: Yes.

Q: But al- Qaeda thought they were sending you back to the UK presumably?

A: Yes. I think that’s the beauty of it.

Q: So they think you’re working for them?

A: Yes.

Q: When you’re actually working for the West?

A: Absolutely.

Spying in London

While in the UK Dean would be watching and gathering information on people like Babar Ahmed, a British man who admitted providing material support to terrorists, and Abu Hamza, convicted in the US earlier this year of supporting terrorism, and Abu Qatada, who was cleared of terrorism charges by a court in Jordan last autumn after a long legal battle to extradite him from the UK. Dean kept an eye on them and others while preaching in mosques and Islamic societies.

Q: The difficulty is though that if you’re there under cover, welcomed there as an al-Qaeda man, you have to keep up this pretence by talking to people at the mosque, you have to encourage them to join the jihad?

A: Yes… although there are limits. I was aware of my boundaries basically about how much you can incite. You use guarded words about general rather than specific incitement. But then the most difficult part actually was after 7/7, 2005. That’s when the laws and regulations regarding incitement like you know were really tightened.

Q: So you couldn’t say what, and you could say what?

A: You can’t specifically urge someone to go. You can’t specifically call for an attack. You can’t glorify violence committed against civilians. You know you have to be careful there. You can sit down there basically and blast the West for what they do. You can sit down there and talk about martyrdom in general without you know touching directly on what’s happening right now. So you have to be clever about how you phrase your words.

Q: Do you ever feel guilty about having encouraged somebody to go to jihad?

A: Yes.

Q: Are there many occasions that this might have happened?

A: There were some occasions where that happened.

Q: What’s the nature of the guilt, because of what they might have been involved in or because of how they ended up?

A: I’m glad that no one was killed. However, one particular person ended up in prison for a long time.

Q: And you were instrumental in getting him out there?

A: I was a contributing factor but I wasn’t the only one.

Saving lives

Dean says he foiled attacks involving suicide bombings and the use of poisons against civilians. He was also able to hand plans to British intelligence of a device that was intended to be used for a chemical attack on the New York subway. In the event, Osama Bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, called off the attack.

They would have used chemical weapons if it wasn’t for al-Zawahiri saying, “No, don’t use it.”

Because it was a cell that was seeking permission from al-Zawahiri saying, “We are in possession of this weapon, we know how to use it now, we know how to deliver it and we have a target for you. It’s the New York subway because we believe that the subway system with all the ventilation mechanism there will be a perfect vehicle for delivering the gas and dispersing it across a wide network.”

And so that’s where Zawahiri said, “No, don’t do it because the retaliation could get out of control.”

Q: He didn’t stop it because he thought it was the wrong thing to do, to put gas on the subway?

A: He stopped it because he was afraid of the ramifications.

Q: So you got these important plans. Can you tell me where you got those plans from?

A: Well, I wouldn’t say even if I was allowed to!

Q: The fact you got those plans though suggests you had a high degree of clearance in al-Qaeda, trust.

A: I think I was privy to these plans because I have a certain talent, and I [pretended I] wanted to use that talent for enabling these attacks. That’s why.

Q: That’s what al-Qaeda thought?

A: Yeah.

Q: What was your certain talent?

A: I wouldn’t say!

Valued first by al-Qaeda and then British security and intelligence, Aimen Dean’s life under cover came to an abrupt end when the cover was blown. An American writer disclosed his identity with details that could only be sourced to Dean. That was eight years ago.

Jeremy Bird in Violation of the Logan Act?

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Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein rejected Wednesday a Likud party petition to disqualify the left-wing V15 group, which was accused by the ruling party of violating election law through its alleged ties with the Zionist Union list. In a press conference last week, Likud lawmakers claimed that the group was being financed illegally, and called for an investigation into alleged dealings with the Zionist Union, which merges the Labor and Hatnua parties, and is headed by Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni.

Are there any Federal funds being used for Jeremy Bird of V15 being used to oust Netanyahu as the Prime Minister of Israel? Is Jeremy Bird being empowered by the White House as it agent working against our Middle East ally, Israel?

The clear intent of this provision [Logan Act] is to prohibit unauthorized persons from intervening in disputes between the United States and foreign governments

WASHINGTON — Jeremy Bird, the architect of the grass-roots and online organizing efforts that powered President Obama’s presidential campaigns from Chicago, is advising a similar operation in Tel Aviv. But this time it is focused on ousting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

His consulting work for the group V15 — an independent Israeli organization that does not support specific candidates but is campaigning to replace Israel’s current government — has added yet another political layer to the diplomatic mess surrounding Mr. Netanyahu’s decision to address a joint meeting of Congress next week on Iran.

The White House has argued that Mr. Netanyahu’s plan to deliver the speech on March 3, two weeks before the Israeli elections, is harming the United States-Israel relationship by injecting partisanship. Republicans contend it is Mr. Obama who is playing politics and cite the work of Mr. Bird as proof that the president is quietly rooting for the defeat of his Israeli counterpart.

A founder of V15, the organization behind that effort. Jim Hollander/European Pressphoto Agency

American strategists have for decades signed on to work in Israeli political campaigns, with Democrats usually aligned with the Labor Party and Republicans often backing Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party. There is no evidence to suggest that Mr. Obama or any of his senior aides had anything to do with the move by his former top campaign official, who has never worked at the White House, to join the effort to defeat Mr. Netanyahu.

But Mr. Bird’s involvement in the elections is drawing attention when tensions between the two countries are so acute that what is usually considered standard practice for American political consultants in Israel is now seen as a provocation.

“It’s clearly a data point that people are looking to that indicates how the relationship has deteriorated,” said Matthew Brooks, the executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition. He added that Mr. Bird reflects “the hypocrisy of this White House, which wants to stand on the notion that they’re not playing politics when in fact their fingerprints are all over this.”

The White House has repeatedly said its highest priority is keeping partisanship out of the relationship between the United States and Israel, citing that principle as Mr. Obama’s rationale for refusing to meet with Mr. Netanyahu during his visit.

Asked about the suggestion that Mr. Obama was tacitly backing an effort to oust Mr. Netanyahu, Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said, “The long tradition of bipartisan support for the U.S.-Israel relationship has served both our countries well for generations, and President Obama will continue to go to great lengths to shield our alliance from the smallness of party politics.”

Mr. Bird, who was Mr. Obama’s national field director in 2012 and is a founding partner of the political consulting firm 270 Strategies, declined to be interviewed. But he said through a spokeswoman that V15 and its partners had asked him and his firm “to share best practices in organizing so they can maximize their impact both online and on the ground.”

“We’re witnessing something special happening in Israel right now: There’s a groundswell of organic energy as more than 10,000 supporters are coming together to have a voice in their country,” Mr. Bird said through the spokeswoman. V15’s “efforts are already paying off as they have reached out to more than 200,000 targeted voters, both in person and on the phone, about the need for change in Israel.”

Administration allies scoff at the accusation that Mr. Bird’s involvement is inappropriate, saying it is particularly galling given Mr. Netanyahu’s move to work with the House speaker, John A. Boehner, an Ohio Republican, to arrange a speech without telling the White House. Many Democrats see the speech as a move that would undercut Mr. Obama’s efforts to forge a nuclear deal with Iran.

“It is eye-rolling for Netanyahu to complain about former Obama aides working against him when he cooked up a speech to Congress with Boehner and didn’t tell the White House,” said Tommy Vietor, a former National Security Council aide to Mr. Obama. “He has removed his ability to complain about playing politics by openly meddling in U.S. politics. The notion that Jeremy and the 270 team were sent there with the blessing of President Obama is just silly.”

Mr. Bird’s work in Israel started in November 2013, when he began consulting with OneVoice, an organization pressing to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He signed on with V15 in December 2014, after Mr. Netanyahu called the March 2015 elections. Last month, the Israel arm of OneVoice became a partner with V15 to mobilize voters.

The effort has angered Mr. Netanyahu and his allies in Israel, who unsuccessfully sought a court injunction against V15, arguing it was violating Israeli election law by accepting foreign donations. Likud withdrew the request last week, citing difficulty in proving the charge.

Republicans in Congress have criticized Mr. Bird’s involvement and the work of OneVoice, which has received grants from the State Department. In a letter to the department last month that prominently mentioned Mr. Bird and his ties to Mr. Obama, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Representative Lee Zeldin of New York, both Republicans, said they were concerned that American taxpayer money was being used to influence the Israeli elections and unseat Mr. Netanyahu.

“It is deeply troubling that President Obama’s national field director is helping run the campaign to defeat the democratically elected leader of one of our closest friends and allies, the nation of Israel,” Mr. Cruz said in an interview on Friday.

In a response to the lawmakers, Julia Frifield, the State Department’s assistant secretary for legislative affairs, said in a statement that OneVoice’s Israel branch received a $233,500 grant in September 2013 to support peace negotiations by Mr. Netanyahu’s government. The grant was paid in installments, with the final one paid in August 2014, before elections were called.

“There is absolutely no basis to claims that the Department of State has funded efforts to influence the current Israeli election campaign,” Ms. Frifield wrote.

Mr. Bird is the latest in a long line of Americans who have worked on foreign political campaigns, particularly in Israel. In December, Mr. Netanyahu hired John McLaughlin, a Republican pollster; Likud has brought on Vincent Harris, a campaign aide to Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky. Former aides to Mr. Obama have also worked for the prime minister, including Bill Knapp and Josh Isay.

Former campaign strategists to Bill Clinton, including his pollster Stanley B. Greenberg and strategist James Carville, went to Israel in 1999 to help Ehud Barak defeat Mr. Netanyahu.

Cables Reveal Iran’s Weapons Status

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Item 7 of leaked intelligence cables from 2012 explains conditions on status of weapons.

Item 7 Iran

 

From an IAEA brief noted December 2014:
*Iran has had a nuclear weapons program since at least the late 1980s.
*In 1989, it set up a management structure for the program responsible to the Ministry of Defence, which it has reorganized over the years.
*At the start, a lot of Iran’s technical knowledge to produce nuclear weapons came from the same underground network which helped countries like Libya. *Iran has also been getting help from an unnamed “nuclear weapon state” (Russia? China?), but it has developed considerable scientific and technical capabilities of its own.
*The program has involved extensive procurement activity, much of it clandestine using false front companies, but benefitting from the fact that many of the components sought have both civilian and military applications.
*In addition to enriching uranium, Iran has been working on converting highly enriched uranium (HEU) into metal, and casting and machining it into the components of a nuclear core.
*It has done modelling and calculations on how an HEU device would function.
*Engineering work has been done on integrating a nuclear device into a missile delivery vehicle.
*Iran has been experimenting with a multipoint initiation system, with the explosives used having the dimensions of a payload that would fit into the warhead chamber of an Iranian Shahab 3 missile which has a range of some 1300 kilometers. (Iran is also working on a longer range missile.)
*Iran has been working on the development of safe, fast-acting detonators which can be triggered within a microsecond of each other in order to set off an implosion-type nuclear device.
*Work has been done on a prototype system for fuzing, arming and firing a nuclear weapon which could explode both in the air above a target and on impact.
*Iran has conducted a number of practical tests to determine how firing equipment might function over long distances with a test device located down a deep shaft; and it has studied safety arrangements for conducting a nuclear test.

***  

By the next decade, according to the IAEA, the regime would consolidate its weaponization researchers under an initiative called the “AMAD Plan,” headed by Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a Ph.D. nuclear engineer and senior member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The AMAD Plan was charged with procuring dual-use technologies, developing nuclear detonators and conducting high-explosive experiments associated with compressing fissile material, according to Western intelligence agencies. The AMAD Plan’s most intense period of activity was in 2002-03, according to the IAEA, when current President Hasan Rouhani headed Iran’s Supreme National Security Council before becoming its chief nuclear negotiator.

Feeling the heat from the MEK’s disclosure of two nuclear facilities in 2002 and the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, the mullahs apparently halted the AMAD Plan’s activities in late 2003. But Mr. Fakhrizadeh and his scientists didn’t stop their weaponization work. As former United Nations weapons inspector David Albright told us, “Fakhrizadeh continued to run the program in the military industry, where you could work on nuclear weapons.” Much of the work, including theoretical explosive modeling, was shifted to Defense Ministry-linked universities, such as Malek Ashtar University of Technology in Tehran.

Mr. Fakhrizadeh has continued to oversee these disparate and highly compartmentalized activities, now under the auspices of Iran’s new Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research, known by its Persian acronym, SPND. The MEK first disclosed the SPND’s existence in 2011. Now the opposition group has obtained what it says are key new biographical details and the first photograph of the 56-year-old Mr. Fakhrizadeh, whom Iran has refused to make available to the IAEA for long-sought interviews.

The MEK has also compiled a list of what it says are 100 SPND researchers. Far from disbanding the SPND, the MEK alleges, the Tehran regime has kept its nucleus of researchers intact. Possibly to avoid detection by the IAEA, the MEK says, the regime recently relocated the SPND’s headquarters from Mojdeh Avenue in Tehran to Pasdaran Avenue. “The new site,” the MEK adds, “is located in between several centers and offices affiliated to the Defense Ministry . . . , the Union of IRGC, the sports organization of the Defense Ministry . . . and Chamran Hospital.”

To further mask the illicit nature of the relocation from the IAEA, the MEK says, “parts of Malek Ashtar University’s logistical activities were transferred to the former site of SPND. The objective was to avoid closing [the former] center, and in the event of inspections, to claim that the site has always had the current formation.” Don’t expect the regime to fess up to much of this by the August 25 deadline set in its joint communique with the IAEA.

The fact that the IAEA and the Western powers are now turning to the weaponization question is a sign of how far the Iranian nuclear-weapons program has progressed. As the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center’s Henry Sokolski, a former nonproliferation director at the Pentagon, told us: “A concern about weaponization followed by testing and use is the moral hazard when you don’t pay attention to fissile-material production.”

In other words, having ceded a right to enrich and permitted the Islamic Republic to develop an advanced enrichment capability, the West is now left with preventing weaponization as the final barrier against a nuclear-capable Iran. The diplomacy of Mr. Rouhani and his Foreign Minister, Javad Zarif, is intended to soothe jittery Western nerves on weaponization.

That palliative effect will be reinforced by the IAEA’s latest quarterly report, also released last week, in which the Agency reported that Iran has sharply reduced its stock of 20% uranium and hasn’t enriched above 5% since the November interim agreement took effect. The report also highlights the Islamic Republic’s new willingness to address at a technical level the “possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear program,” including Tehran’s development of exploding bridge-wire detonators and high-explosives testing.

But if past is precedent and the MEK’s new disclosures are to be believed, Mr. Fakhrizadeh will continue to do his work as he has to this day. The snake may shed its skin but not its temper, runs an old Persian proverb.

Islamic State Destroying Civilization’s Artifacts

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Last month, Islamic State was in Mosul destroying tangible history on civilization, some items were rare manuscripts dating back 3000 years. Books were loaded into trucks and taken away to be destroyed.

An Iraqi lawmaker, Hakim al-Zamili, said the Islamic State group “considers culture, civilization and science as their fierce enemies.”

Al-Zamili, who leads the parliament’s Security and Defense Committee, compared the Islamic State group to raiding medieval Mongols, who in 1258 ransacked Baghdad. Libraries’ ancient collections of works on history, medicine and astronomy were dumped into the Tigris River, purportedly turning the waters black from running ink.

“The only difference is that the Mongols threw the books in the Tigris River, while now Daesh is burning them,” he said, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group. “Different method, but same mentality.”

If you still doubt the Islamic State mission to destroy all things non-Islamic, which Barack Obama does doubt, then consider Gilgamesh as part of part of the history.

Gilgamesh was a legendary king and hero of the city-state of Uruk. The historical Gilgamesh was a Sumarian king of Uruk around 2700 BC. According to the Sumerian king list, Gilgamesh was the fifth king of Uruk (Early Dynastic II, first dynasty of Uruk), the son of Lugalbanda. Legend has it that his mother was Ninsun, a goddess. Sumarian fragments of the legend that grew up around him have been found dating back to about 2000 BC.

The Gilgamesh Epic is the most notable literary product of Babylonia discovered in the mounds of Mesopotamia. In the epic named after him, Gilgamesh, the Sumerian king of Uruk, seeks to escape death, but ultimately concludes this is futile and turns to lasting works of culture to achieve immortality. The Babylonian king Gilgamesh was said to be one-third human and two-thirds god. He ruled the city of Uruk on the Euphrates River more than four thousand years ago in what is now Iraq. According to legend, the gods sent him a series of ordeals, starting with the wild man Enkidu, who challenged the king and reformed his abuses of power. Once reconciled, the two embarked on a quest to fell all the cedar trees of southern Iran and slay Humbaba, the demon residing there. So begin the tales of Gilgamesh.

The Islamic State released a video Thursday showing sledgehammer-wielding militants destroying artefacts dating back thousands of years in Mosul’s central museum, yet another act of destruction in the radical Islamist group’s rampage through the Middle East.

The five-minute video begins with a verse from the Koran condemning idol worship, followed by an ISIS militant denouncing the polytheism of the ancient Assyrian and Akkadian cultures. The militant cites Muhammad’s destruction of the idols in Mecca as the precedent for their actions.

“These statues and idols, these artifacts, if God has ordered its removal, they became worthless to us even if they are worth billions of dollars,” he declares.

The militants then set on the statues with sledgehammers.

The video also includes footage from an archeological site in Mosul in which a fighter drills through a 7th century BC Assyrian sculpture of a winged bull.

A caption claims that the artefacts did not exist in the time of the prophet, having since been put on display by “devil worshippers,” possibly a reference to the Yazidi minority.

The international community has condemned this latest act of destruction by the extremist group. The Guardian provided some of the reaction from influential voices in the region:

 “The birthplace of human civilisation … is being destroyed”, said Kino Gabriel, one of the leaders of the Syriac Military Council – a Christian militia – in a telephone interview with the Guardian from Hassakeh in north-eastern Syria. […] “In front of something like this, we are speechless,” said Gabriel. “Murder of people and destruction is not enough, so even our civilisation and the culture of our people is being destroyed.”

“When you watch the footage, you feel visceral pain and outrage, like you do when you see human beings hurt,” said Mardean Isaac, an Assyrian writer and member of A Demand for Action, an organisation dedicated to protecting the rights of the Assyrians and other minorities in Syria and Iraq. […]

“I’m totally shocked,” Amir al-Jumaili [a professor at the Archaeology College in Mosul] told the AP. “It’s a catastrophe. With the destruction of these artefacts, we can no longer be proud of Mosul’s civilisation.” […]

Isaac said: “While the Islamic State is ethnically cleansing the contemporary Assyrian populations of Iraq and Syria, they are also conducting a simultaneous war on their ancient history and the right of future generations of all ethnicities and religions to the material memory of their ancestors.”

John Kerry vs. James Clapper

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Is it prudent or wise to under-estimate terror threats? Is it honest to downplay reality and blame attacks on just a few telegraphing the reasons to be just single lone wolves? Secretary of State John Kerry and the Director of the Office of National Intelligence seem to differ dramatically on intelligence matters.

 

Kerry and Clapper sit in the same meetings and they collectively participate in joint video conference calls on ‘critic’ (critical incident reports), flashing read terror events, and share in emails as part of agency distribution address lists. So this begs the question, how is it that Kerry and Clapper can be so far apart in assessing and telegraphing the global threat matrix just a day apart from testimony?

Kerry: “Our citizens, our world today is actually, despite ISIL, despite the visible killings that you see and how horrific they are, we are actually living in a period of less daily threat to Americans and to people in the world than normally, less deaths, less violent deaths today than through the last century.”  Video here.

Clapper: ““When the final accounting is done. 2014 will be the most lethal year in global terrorism in the 45 years such data has been compiled. About half of all attacks including fatalities in 2014 occurred in just three countries, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan.” Video here.

Clapper is the top intelligence official appointed to receive and analyze all global threats to the West that not only simmer but occur daily.

His opening statement says more to what the actual threat matrix is than John Kerry will allow himself to admit. Opening statement is here. Sadly, there is a non-bloody threat as well that rarely gets mentioned except Clapper did speak to it.

President Obama’s top intelligence official pointed to a range of threats facing America Thursday, from the surge by Sunni Muslim extremist groups in the Middle East, to the pursuit of nuclear weapons by Iran and North Korea, to the push by Russian and Chinese operatives to penetrate Washington’s clandestine national security community.

But one threat was listed above all others in congressional testimony provided by Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper — that of cyberattacks carried out by a growing host of politically, as well as criminally motivated actors against both government and private U.S. computer networks .

“Cyber threats to U.S. national and economic security are increasing in frequency, scale, sophistication and severity of impact; [and] the ranges of cyber threat actors, methods of attack, targeted systems and victims are also expanding,” Mr. Clapper said in prepared remarks to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

While the threat is complex, however, Mr. Clapper downplayed the idea America is at a high risk of having its infrastructure crippled by a major doomsday-like “Cyber Armageddon” scenario.

“The likelihood of a catastrophic attack from any particular actor is remote at this time,” he said. “We envision something different. We foresee an ongoing series of low-to-moderate level cyberattacks from a variety of sources over time, which will impose cumulative costs on US economic competitiveness and national security.”

Computer system attacks by Russian, Chinese, Iranian and North Korea operatives represent the biggest threat, the intelligence director said. “Politically motivated cyberattacks are now a growing reality, and foreign actors are reconnoitering and developing access to U.S. critical infrastructure systems, which might be quickly exploited for disruption if an adversary’s intent became hostile,” he said. “In addition, those conducting cyber espionage are targeting U.S. government, military and commercial networks on a daily basis.”

Mr. Clapper’s remarks came as part of the intelligence community’s annual reporting to Congress on worldwide threats facing the U.S. The intelligence director’s prepared testimony is generally regarded each year as the declassified boilerplate of the intelligence community’s annual assessment of those threats.

In addition to cyber, Thursday’s threat assessment pointed to dangers associated with a variety of other developments around the globe, from Russia’s ongoing military action in eastern Ukraine, to the political and security crises in Syria and Libya, to the spread Boko Haram Islamic extremist attacks from Nigeria into Chad, Niger and Cameroon.

China’s nuclear weapons

Among the more notable passages in the assessment was one asserting that “the leading state intelligence threats to U.S. interests in 2015 will continue to be Russia and China, based on their capabilities, intent and broad operational scopes.”

The evolving nuclear weapons pursuits of Iran and North Korea were also noted — as was that of China, where the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA’s) Second Artillery Force continues to “modernize its nuclear missile force by adding more survivable road-mobile systems and enhancing its silo-based systems,” according to the assessment.

“This new generation of missiles is intended to ensure the viability of China’s strategic deterrent by providing a second strike capability,” it stated. “In addition, the PLA Navy continues to develop the JL-2 submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) and might produce additional JIN-class nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines.” “The JIN-class submarines, armed with JL-2 SLBMs, will give the PLA Navy its first long-range, sea-based nuclear capability,” the assessment said. “We assess that the Navy will soon conduct its first nuclear deterrence patrols.”

Mr. Clapper testified that “Sunni violent extremists are gaining momentum and the number of Sunni violent extremist groups, members and safe havens is greater than at any other point in history.”

While he said “the threat to key U.S. allies and partners will probably increase,” the intelligence director added that the growing number of the extremist groups is likely to be “balanced by a lack of cohesion and authoritative leadership.”

He also said that while “the January 2015 attacks against Charlie Hebdo in Paris is a reminder of the threat to the West,” most groups place a higher priority on “local concerns” than on attacking the so-called far enemy of the the U.S. and the West — the way that Osama Bin Laden’s original al Qaeda had been so focused during the years leading up to and immediately following Sept. 11, 2001.

But Mr. Clapper’s testimony suggested that there is still uncertainty surrounding the threat posed by the Islamic State movement, known by the acronym ISIL.

“If ISIL were to substantially increase the priority it places on attacking the West rather than fighting to maintain and expand territorial control, then the group’s access to radicalized Westerners who have fought in Syria and Iraq would provide a pool of operatives who potentially have access to the United States and other Western countries,” he said. “Since the conflict began in 2011, more than 20,000 foreign fighters — at least 3,400 of whom are Westerners — have gone to Syria from more than 90 countries.”